Maybe group work is not normal for every program, as this was by far the worst group experience I have ever had. For one it was extremely hard to get everyone together to meet up. I don't know why. Usually when I have something due to work on I will make the time to meet up and work on the project. Unless, of course, I have something that I absolutely need to go to. I did have something more important during one group meeting, which was a Christmas party at an oil company. I thought it would be a great experience for me to go to this dinner, and it proved valuable as I met someone who is willing to train me on a major geophysical processing program. I made time to attend every other group meeting throughout the course though, which I don't think anyone else can say except Brock. It wasn't just one person missing per meeting, it was usually two and sometimes three or four who didn't show up. To me its hard to believe that three people are unable to attend at the same time on more than one occasion. Maybe these people didn't think the class was too important, as it is only an option. Maybe they didn't understand the work. Maybe they just didn't care, I don't know. I know its easy to put a task behind other seemingly more important tasks, especially when there is no solid due date on the work needing to be done, but its different when other people are counting on you to be at a place to help.
Secondly, this group was extremely hard to work with because it was so hard for everyone to agree upon something. Four weeks ago the majority of the group, including myself, decided and outlined what we would like to work on, the -isms of gaming, with much resentment from some members. We drew up a plan and decided roughly how we were going to go about it. We also set the next meeting date such that everyone could attend. The next meeting proved a waste of time since there was still resentment about the topic we agreed upon. There was also a member who seemed like they wanted to do their own project and got quite angry, even to a point of being childish, when the rest of us disagreed with what they were saying. I might expect this kind of behaviour from a spoiled kid in grade 1, but at the university level it was embarrassing. It was almost like the person expected us to do everything their way. It took almost 20 minutes to calm the person down during this incident and get them back on track to figure out what their problem is. The meeting was also difficult as not everyone showed up and there was only 2 of us left after only an hour. We had agreed to work on the project as long as it took to figure something out but members of the group ended up leaving early.
In this meeting I took a leadership roll in saying what needs to be done, by what date, and how we're going to do it. I've never had to assert myself as being a leader before in a situation like this, maybe that's because I never had to before, but it felt pretty good. The members at the meeting seemed ok with everything I was saying, except the one person who wanted to change the project, and I thought I had everything under control. I made sure to reiterate what I had said on Facebook during the meeting to make it clear what was expected. Perhaps the next time I find myself in a leadership position I need to be more clear about things and explain everything in detail. I figured it would be fairly common knowledge that when you post a link somewhere to also include a brief summary of the link with the post so people know what the link is about. I figured this was common sense as it seems to be the normal practice across the internet and in the blogging world. Needless to say it seems like only one other person posted relevant information along with their link. Who knows if the others even read the links they posted. I also need to learn to set consequences for actions not met too and actions not performed properly. Again, maybe people didn't care what or how they posted since there was no negative retribution for their actions.
I honestly don't know what happened during this group project. I thought it was a pretty simple idea and a fun way to close out the semester of a great course. Other groups look like they had a good time working on this project. Ours was far from fun, which was too bad because I really enjoyed this class. It seemed like we could only agree on something for 5 minutes before someone got sidetracked or had a problem with something.
There could have been an ideological conflict between two members as well. One person seemed strongly opinionated about a topic and the other member felt as equally as strong but in the opposite side of the argument. This created a lot of argument between the two people. I got the feeling that the two individuals resented each other, almost as if they strongly didn't like one another. It also seemed like they would go against each other on any issue just annoy one another. Even on something as simple as colour choice in the slideshow, one of the two people who conflicted with each other would pick design 2 for the theme of the slides and right away the other person in the conflict would say 'no i don't like that, that's horrible'. Yet another display of a totally unexpected immature outburst. Maybe these students learned that if they act this way that they could get what they want. The situation truly made me feel uncomfortable. There was many times when me, or another member of the group, had to intervene and get matters back on track.
Maybe individuals in other faculties don't partake in any form of group work in school, or haven't yet, so they don't know how to do it? Maybe this project was one of those things that seems too simple to be true? Perhaps my ideologies of something being easy to do differ from what others consider easy? Perhaps these outlandish and complex ideas being introduced by Keith aren't so complex to him. I'm sure if I pitched an analysis on gaming physics and computer code then the other members of the group would think I'm nuts too, but that stuff I find relatively straight forward. There were some members who insisted we needed to keep adding more and more, perhaps this is what they're used to? Continuous expansion of ideas... But at the same time maybe this is where the focus was lost. It could have been that the personalities of the people in the group clashed so much that we weren't able to work together. I haven't heard of such a thing though in a professional type setting. Like I said most people are usually pretty willing to work on a task to achieve a common goal even if they don't like it. But that's just my viewpoint.
The entire mishap of this project could have been some people's lack of understanding of independent learning too. Some people in this class are still used to being guided through school, which includes being handed an outline, the instructor scheduling deadlines, telling what is expected, everything being set clearly. It was quite interesting to see how some people were almost panicking during parts of the course because they had no idea what to do. It goes back to the addiction discussions and the symptoms of breaking an addiction. The structure is the addiction and the panic and stress is the symptom of breaking that addiction. This class forced people to think for themselves, gain an interest in what they were learning by themselves, and schedule their own time to participate in and out of class as nothing was required and nothing was due until the end of the term.
With all that being said I don't think we achieved our goal of examining sexism in games, we didn't do a valuable critique on the subject. I don't think we did this because we had trouble working together and agreeing upon things. I honestly did not feel like our final outcome was ready but it was at the point where I felt defeated. I feel that if we took the extension on the project the outcome would have been the same, it would have just prolonged the stress.
At least I can say I tried my best on this work and I asserted myself as a leader, which was something new for me. I can take away some skills and team work knowledge from this otherwise frustrating experience.
I don't even think the work was that difficult to complete. What we had to do was outlined and there was enough time given to work on this project.
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